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Tag Archives: Tony Abbott

Social Media – noun. The term given to the time wasting devices to end all time wasting devices.

“I was told there wouldn’t be reptiles.”

Here I sit, doubled over with laughter after watching Karl Stefanovic get freaked out by a fake spider which is – in fact – not a reptile.

Although I need to make my blog post for the week, I find myself stuck in a never-ending spiral of Karl Stefanovic and Arnold Schwarzenegger videos. Despite being hailed as one of the greatest things to happen to journalism (or so QUTOJ1’s unit co-ordinator Susan would lead you to believe) social media has plenty of practical applications, almost none of which I use. Instead, I prefer to use social media to waste time on pointless videos of Arnie making terrible puns (strong language by the way) .

While I am guilty of being a serial procrastinator, one saving grace I have is that my Twitter feed is filled with politicians and journalistsposting about genuinely important things. Even though I check Twitter much less often than Facebook or Instagram or even Snapchat, it counts for something right?

With the Federal Election campaign currently running, politicians using Twitter an other forms of social media are at an all-time high. Some attribute this trend (at least here in Australia) to the Kevin 07 campaign which grabbed hold of social media with both hands, which came with old Kevin “Fair Shake of the Sauce Bottle” Rudd being a bit of a nerd.

So with the veritable pre-election battleground being shifted to the social media front like a particularly boring and prophetic sci-fi novel from ‘50s, we’re now seeing a rise in a form of audience participation in leadership debates (like the one held last night) like we’ve never seen before. Sure The Worm has been a thing for a while, but the use of twitter to determine the public’s reaction is practically unheard of. The ABC did up this handy graph which shows Australia reacted to the big issues in the debate. Not how, but how much.

This brings me to The Big Problem with social media. Quantity =/= Quality. For every informed voter making a tweet about the debate, there could be at least another two armchair socialists commenting on how Tony Abbott’s smile doesn’t reach his eyes or two Liberal fanatics that are tweeting: “is it just me or is Kev’s face totally punchable LOL #auspol.”

And let’s not even get into bloggers turned journalists, which as far as I’m concerned can be a blog for another week.